1. Isn't this language of 'master narratives' really Lyotard's, and not Derrida? (If not, where does Derrida deal with it? I would be interested if this comes up somewhere.) 2. I tend to agree with James that deconstruction has reached a sort of impasses (we can see this with de Man's disciple Andrej Warminski who continually rereads the same texts to find the same enigma... language, the unknown god) however, Derrida does come up with concepts in his reading, in this I am thinking about the concept of the trace, differance, etc. 4. Beyond this, I think that deconstruction may have put some new demands on the act of reading itself, but this is perhaps the most tentative of my suppositions. robert wood
P.S. For my money, there are already a couple really good critiques of Derrida produced by Foucault in the 1960's.
P.P.S. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the deconstructionist party.
> "By the way, James, there are a lot of traditional leftists who hate
> Derrida for promoting self-doubt among intellectuals. You rightly point to
> the decline of the radical labor movement as key to the crisis of Marxism,
> but do you think the intellectuals were/are wrong to become so
> self-questioning, and skeptical of, yadda yadda, master narratives?"
>
> It is a good question, but first a proviso. Derrida was a philosopher, and
> deserves to have his philosophy looked at in its own right, independent of
> any political conclusions. There is no doubt that there is a lot of
> technical developments in it that are admirable in their own right, but I
> think it is ultimately flawed. The relationship between politics was
> opened up for discussion by Derrida insofar as he addressed Marx - but
> that would not exhaust his work, by any stretch.
>
> So to answer your question, I would say that, insofar as you can see
> Derrida (and the wider 'deconstruction' school that followed him) as
> inaugurating a general deconstruction of master narratives, that is rather
> problematic. I mean that a critique that in its basic outlines is
> applicable to all ideologies, is one that treats their actual content as
> incidental, addressing only their form. It reduces liberalism to marxism
> to fascism. All are 'grand narratives'. To push the point one could say
> that it leaves them all untouched in their particulars. Deconstruction can
> sit happily alongside an ironic, self-knowing imperialism, such as we see
> argued by the EU official Robert Cooper.
>
> So, no, of course it is not wrong to criticise received opinion. But a
> blanket criticism is no criticism at all. (Indeed, to paraphrase Alasdair
> MacIntyre, deconstruction of master narratives is itself a master
> narrative.) What deconstruction offered to students was a cheap erudition
> that allowed them to dismiss schools of thought without ever really
> bothering to master them.
>
> The attraction for me of Marxism (and Hegelianism) is that it develops
> thought through criticism. But deconstruction only deconstructs. As
> Francis Bacon says somewhere the difference between me and the sceptics is
> that I doubt everything at the first setting out, as a way towards greater
> knowledge, but they see doubt as the goal (paraphrase from memory).
>
>
> More than that, and this is unreasonably to make Derrida stand in for a
> general movement, the post-modern moment seemed like it was a radical
> position coming from the margins, but by the 1990s it was more like the
> mainstream, characteristic of a corrosive scepticism, that ran alongside a
> broad disengagement with politics. It was close to being the dominant
> ideology of the age (never wholly of course - there is no gainsaying the
> enduring traction that free markets, family and nation have on people).
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